Tag: Teaching

Teach & Serve II, No. 9 – You Don’t Get to Choose When the Crisis Hits

October 5, 2016

As teachers and administrators we exist to do many things, one of those things is to provide stability in the face of crisis.

I read comic books. I’ve read them since I was in the first grade and, though I tried to give them up my freshman year of college, the effort to “grow up” didn’t take. I have moved into the 21st century in my collecting and no longer buy physical issues, but purchase my comics electronically and access them via my iPad. Pretty cool stuff.

One of the major tropes in traditional, superhero comic books is villains do bad things that heroes have to address. What works out great for the heroes is that these bad things villains do normally happen in sequences. The Joker causes Batman trouble for a few issues, then Two-Face, then the Riddler. Rarely do they overlap in their assaults.

How kind of them. It gives good old Batman a chance to recover from one crisis and plan for the next.

I have found in my career that rarely are the circumstances of crisis so kind. I never got to choose when the crisis hit.

When the waters are troubled, when things challenge our institutions, when tragedy comes or bad things happen, inevitably our students, families and colleagues look around them for stability. They look around them for leadership.

They look to us.

As teachers and administrators we exist to do many things, one of those things is to provide stability in the face of crisis.

It’s not just about having crisis plans though, if you don’t have them, you’d better get them put together quickly and, if you don’t have an ongoing process of review, you’d better develop one. Crisis plans are important, without question. However, they are steps in processes. They are ladders to climb and guidelines to follow. They help center and routinize and react.

They don’t help lead.

Bracketing the debate about whether leaders are born, not made, there is little doubt that most good leaders share similar qualities and one of those is preparation. Most good leaders are prepared and they are ready.

But how can we be prepared for what we don’t know is coming?

There are ways.

Leaders anticipate events. They anticipate the good but, perhaps more importantly, they anticipate the bad, the challenging, the tragic. When good comes, it’s smiles all around. Good is an easy place from which to lead. Bad, on the other hand, is not. It is a challenging place from which to lead – perhaps the most challenging. Teachers who anticipate the cheating, the loss of their own cool, the bad behaviors in their classrooms are not surprised when these things (and others) occur. They are ready because they knew they were coming. Administrators who know they will have to dismiss employees, confront their own errors in judgement, handle difficult parents and other negative scenarios do not collapse from their shock at having to address these kinds of events because they anticipated them.

In order to be ready for crisis, excellent leaders visualize what’s coming. What will it feel like when a student directs their negative energy at me? What will it feel like when a teacher has such a terrific lapse in judgement that they have to be dismissed? What will it feel like when there is a death in our community? We can think through specific events before they happen. And we should.

Athletes and actors rehearse. They learn their parts and, through the exercise, they improve. Why do we not emphasize this sort of activity for ourselves? We can role play events before they happen. In schools, we are going to confront terrible events and we can name the scenarios: discipline issues in our classrooms, irrational staff members, irate parents, suicidal students. The list is significant. How much better might we be at handling these issues if we brought together other leaders in the schools and played out these scenes. Have someone play the role of the teacher whose lapses in judgement require probation or dismal or have them play the unhinged parent or the grieving family. Have them take on the character of a social worker coming to the school to interview a kid or of a kid who’s reporting a sexual assault. Do what you can to make it seem real. Don’t let the crisis be the first time you’ve considered what you will say and how you will be effected – how you will react. Role play the challenges of which you can think. In this way, you face the issues before they come and work through them.

I wish the crises I face were more like the Joker, Two Face and the Riddler. I wish they came on predictable schedules and were heralded by maniacal proclamations. My crises are not like this and I am not like Batman.

What I can be and hope, more often than not, I am is prepared. If we anticipate, visualize and game plan, we can lead through crisis even though we don’t get to choose when it hits.

Teach & Serve II, No. 8 – I Hope Our Students Are Better

September 28, 2016

How did it become a good thing to be less informed, less inquisitive, less prepared?

When did it become a strength to be unclear, unfocused and obscure?

There’s something going on in the United States that, as educators, we should consider and counter. There is a significant shift in our cultural consciousness from valuing intelligence and preparation to valuing … something else, something other, something dangerous.

Dangerous is the right word for us as educators because, if the culture says being undereducated and unprepared is what we should be, schools might as well close up shop. If the culture is saying intelligence is bad, what the hell are we doing? If the idea is that a high level of preparation and proficiency should be mocked, are we not just wasting our collective time?

When did this all become okay?

I love watching smart people doing smart things. I love being in conversations when the talk around me is high level talk and the people are smarter than I (and I am in a lot of conversations like this). I love seeing ingenuity at work, intelligence on display, preparation in abundance.

I spent many years talking to students about being smart, being hard working, being prepared. I talked about these things as gold standards, as things to be admired, as values to be attained. They were things to which we should aspire. I would challenge students. Be cleverer. Be better prepared. Be controlled. Be quick and nimble and intelligent.

Be smart.

I am not currently in a classroom and, lately, when I ruminate about how I might discuss with young people this shift in national consciousness, I am at a loss for concepts and words.

Perhaps that’s okay. I guess that is what is valued now. We want our students to be at a loss for words, right? We want them to grope for the simplest vocabulary. We want them to only access the most basic concepts. We don’t desire multi-step, multi-faceted plans. Why would we? Plans with one or two steps should suffice and, if the problems to be addressed by our plans are more complex than we can imagine, we simply need to beat them into the shape of our mindsets. There is nothing beyond our frames-of-reference that we should know. All that is beyond us should conform to our perceptions.

That’s so much easier. And it requires so much less of me as a leader, as a teacher, as a person.

That’s good, right? To be less? To find the easiest route? To dumb it down?

This is dangerous, teachers. Dangerous. It doesn’t matter if you’re Republican, Democrat, Independent, unaffiliated or uninterested. In this context, the idea that somehow being less is really being more is dangerous.

Teaching has a counter-cultural bent to it. It always has. When you give young people the keys to the kingdom, as it were, and teach them how systems work and how they don’t, when they find out how to put the apples in the cart and then upset that same cart, when they are exposed to truth, they sometimes think they know better than their teachers.

In many ways, in our current context, I hope they do. I hope they know better than the messages they are receiving.

September 21, 2016

… how often are we wound tightly by the seriousness of our work? How often are we so taken with the gravity of the job that we forget to smile? How often, each and every day, do we laugh.

When I first began teaching, I didn’t laugh. Isn’t the oft repeated adage “don’t let them see you smile until Christmas”? I thought that good advice. For a very long time, I tried to rein in the impulse to laugh, to joke, to be humorous. Later when I became an administrator, I thought it all the more important to be serious – to treat administrative jobs with as much gravitas as they deserved.

And, for a very long time, the very last thing I would laugh at publically was myself.

True story. I once applied for a job I didn’t get and, for me, it was kind of a big deal.

I had served a year as acting principal of my alma mater, taking over the role after the individual who preceded me was let go in late May. It was not a part of the ways that was terribly well orchestrated or planned out, in my opinion, and, though I was hopeful to have a principal job at some point in my career, stepping into this one this way was not how I had drawn it up.

In the spring of the ensuing year, I had applied for the position, eager to get the term “Acting” removed from the title, anxious to hold the position without asterisk. I interview. I thought I had done well. I received signals indicating I was the horse to beat. I heard from my direct supervisor that I could rest easy.

I didn’t get the job.

Some of the hardest months of my professional life were those immediately following that decision. They may well have been some of the hardest months of my life in general. At this point, most of those days have slipped into the comforting obscurity of memories I’d rather not remember. I am, however, afraid that a particular memory will never leave me.

In truth – and this is not hubris – most people thought I would receive the position. When I did not, there was some surprise and the faculty had to be told. I thought they needed to be told by my supervisor. He agreed and we determined that the faculty would be informed at the normally scheduled faculty meeting which was only two days after I was told I wouldn’t be staying on.

I didn’t want to be there.

We agreed that I would wait in the hallway outside the library while he gave the news and I would come in after he was done. We calculated that 10 minutes would be more than enough time for the news to be conveyed and, when 600 seconds had passed, I opened the library doors and walked through them.

… you know the electronic sensors most libraries have at their doors to prevent books growing legs? Our library had these and, while I wasn’t carrying a book of any kind, those sensors decided that announcing my presence to the gathered faculty at that particular moment was the right thing to do.

I came in. The alarms blared. The faculty turned to see what was causing the sound and there I was.

“Perfect.” I said, laughing. “That’s perfect.”

And it was.

I laughed. I laughed loudly and deeply. I laughed perhaps the most real laugh I had been able to muster since hearing I wasn’t the choice for the job because – what the hell? – it was pretty damned funny.

When I laughed, the room broke up as well.

Perfect. It was the moment we all needed.

What we do is serious work. We hold the future of children in our hands. We are trusted to do hard and good work with them. This is a pursuit none of us should take for granted or lightly. But how often are we wound tightly by the seriousness of our work? How often are we so taken with the gravity of the job that we forget to smile? How often, each and every day, do we laugh.

And how often do we allow others to laugh at us?

As teachers and administrators, we have to give our colleagues and our students our permission to laugh at us. Sometimes, they even need our permission to laugh with us. Please, please, give that permission because what we do is serious and it often is hard and challenging. We are, in fact, shepherding the future.

It’s a pretty awesome responsibility.

Let’s not make it a grave one, as well.

Let’s laugh and let’s allow people to laugh with us.

And laugh at us.

If we don’t, when the library alarm sounds, we might be scared, embarrassed and broken instead of smiling.

Teach & Serve II, No. 5 – Explore. Seek Out. Go Boldly.

September 7, 2016

Isn’t that what we want our students to become? Explorers? Don’t we want them to be seekers? And are we really doing our best by them if we aren’t inspiring them to go boldly?

Teachers, listen up. Here is a quick history lesson for you… and it begins, as many journeys of discovery do, in failure.

A failed television show aired its last episode on a Friday night in the spring of 1969. The show was called Star Trek and the episode was called “Turnabout Intruder.” The less said about this seventy-ninth and final episode of Star Trek, the better. When the final title card lit television screens (not that many of them), Star Trek signed off the air with no fanfare and very little interest, destined to fade into… well, history as it turned out.

On the strength of syndication of the original seventy-nine episodes and through the support of a very dedicated, potentially crazy fan base (with a little help from a small, independent science fiction movie called Star Wars), Star Trek found its way back into production less than ten years after its cancellation, this time as a big screen movie.

At the conclusion of 1978’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a title card fills the screen following the Enterprise saving earth once again. “The Human Adventure Is Just Beginning” the card announces indicating that this first Star Trek movie would not be the last.

It wasn’t.

Star Trek has spun off five times as television series to date. The sixth Star Trek television show premieres in January of 2017. Star Trek has spawned thirteen films to date. A fourteenth has been announced.

The phenomenon has gone on for fifty years. That’s right. Star Trek has been around for a half century. Thursday, September 8, 1966, the show went on the air. Thursday, September 8, 2016 is the actual mark, the anniversary, the big day.

So what? Why should anyone who is not a pop culture lover, not a science fiction fan, not a Trekker care? Why should teachers and educators care?

Is it because of the damned persistence of the show and its fans? The never-say-die, Spock Lives! attitude that kept the thing afloat all this time? Is that not a great lesson for us as teachers? Should we not learn something from this example, that each time we are down, we are not out? Should we not pass this on to our students? Should we not praise this kind of dedication?

Of course we should, but that’s not the only reason Star Trek should inspire us as educators.

Is it because Star Trek, at its best, presented a unified future where men and women of all colors and races (including alien ones) worked together in near harmony? Is it because Star Trek was the first (no hyperbole here, it was the first) show to feature a black woman in a role that had real responsibility, an Asian American who was not a villain or a sidekick, the first interracial kiss? Is it because Star Trek took on race riots and segregation and class warfare? It did all those things, you know. Should we not underscore these contributions to American thought?

Of course we should, but that’s not the primary reason we as teachers should celebrate Star Trek.

Is it because in a time when science fiction primarily portrayed bleak visions of the future, when dystopias were the rage in the sci fi world, when it seemed more likely that humanity would destroy itself rather than persist, Star Trek stood as an example to point to? Is it because Star Trek showed a vision of the future where humanity had conquered want and need and boarders and had reached – united – into the star? Should we not praise Star Trek for this message of hope?

Of course we should, but there is one better reason to applaud Star Trek.

… its five-year mission: to EXPLORE strange, new worlds, toSEEK OUT new life and new civilizations, to BOLDLY GO where no one has gone before…

Explore. Seek Out. Go Boldly.

My goodness, if those don’t sound like words that all of our schools should have in their mission statements. What could be a better mantra for us to impart to our students?

Explore. Seek Out. Go Boldly.

I am a Star Trek fan from… well, from way back. I cannot remember a time when Star Trek wasn’t a part of my life. I thrilled to the adventures of Kirk, Spock and McCoy in reruns on weekday afternoons. I watched the spin offs. I saw the films. I wrote my own Star Trek fiction, read the books, immersed myself in this unique world. And why? Because I am a geek?

Sure, that’s true. But more critical for me and for so many others was the message – the mantra: Explore. Seek Out. Go Boldly.

It’s what made me a teacher. No doubt. Star Trek made me a teacher.

There is a terrific line in Star Trek Into Darkness where the irascible Mr. Scott, upon learning that the Enterprise is about to take on weaponry for their next mission, confronts Captain Kirk. “I thought we were explorers…” he says.

Isn’t that what we want our students to become? Explorers? Don’t we want them to be seekers? And are we really doing our best by them if we aren’t inspiring them to go boldly? To go boldly on their human adventure?

Star Trek not only celebrates the future, it celebrates the future of intelligence, of mastery, of education. It doesn’t fear smart people, it exalts them. You might be surprised at the number of conflicts in Star Trek that are not solved with weapons and fighting, but are solved with logic and reason and love. Sometimes using those tools is the boldest choice of all.

“Inside you is the potential to make yourself better… and that is what it is to be human… to make yourself better than you are” said Captain Picard of the Next Generation.

A teacher couldn’t have said it better herself.

Star Trek lives, and it lives in you if you are a teacher worth your salt… (which brings us to the first aired episode of Star Trek – “The Man Trap” – but that’s another story).

Teach & Serve II, No. 4 – Fight the System

August 31, 2016

Because we often venerate those who came before us in our institutions, we tend to venerate the systems they created right along with them.

We sometimes talk about “human systems” – the architecture of people who live and work and journey together. These human systems are the ways we relate, the hierarchies we put in place to deal with one another. They help orient where we stand. And how. They are important sociological structures that keep our schools functioning. Without these, our schools would descend into chaos.

Of the many elements that unite schools – private, public, charter and otherwise – perhaps none are so prominent as the fact that schools are places which rely on human systems that create systems on which we all rely. Attendance procedures, grading scales, assignment turn in policies, employee handbooks, you name it, schools have them. They prescribe how cell phones are to be used, where food can be consumed, how people (students and faculty alike) can dress. Systems and structures abound in school settings. Even those schools that cast themselves as innovative and free, open and would like to suggest they don’t have systems do. They have systems. They have structures.

How does a student get out of class to go to Counseling? Fill out a pass. Have it signed and countersigned. System.

When does a teacher round up a students’ grade? Check the manual. System.

How do we get to the parking lot during a fire drill? System.

What are the on-boarding procedures for our new faculty and staff? System.

Here’s where the trouble comes. We sometimes define ourselves and our schools by our systems. Because we normally do good work and our schools and collaborate to develop solid systems, it’s hard to recognize when the time has come to shut them down. Because we typically trust the people with whom we’ve created said systems, we have trust in the systems themselves. Because we often venerate those who came before us in our institutions, we tend to venerate the systems they created right along with them.

Therefore, we sometimes adhere to systems long after we should for fear of offending someone. We resist updating outmoded policies and procedures because Janney designed them in 1998 and we love Janney.

No one wants to make Janney feel bad.

But that’s not the point, is it? The point is, as our schools move through the years, the systems that looked so shiny, so snappy and so smart when we designed them inevitably show their wear-and-tear.

How many libraries in our schools kept the card catalogs years longer than necessary? Raise your hand if your school still has it…

How many schools resisted moving to data driven decision making processes because the systems they had in place – largely anecdotal, often inaccurate – had worked just fine for years, thank you very much.

How many schools continue to prop up old systems instead of building new ones?

Break up the system. The system is not the person.

Schools that are forward thinking, ready to adapt and change to meet the needs of any new day, understand that systems must change even when the people behind them do not change. Schools that do this with facility build into their systems the understanding that they are temporary, that they will become obsolete. This is stated truth and lived fact.